25. Dear Diary

I couldn't fall asleep that night. My head was full of what-ifs. What if he decided he didn't want to talk to me? What if he'd met someone else? What if he had a wife and kids over there all along, and this was just his way out of it? It was six hours later over there, so I kept counting the hours, knowing he'd probably read it when he woke up for work in the morning. But what if he didn't have time to respond before he went to work? Then I'd have to wait to hear from him until his lunch break. I tossed and turned and checked my phone every few minutes.

At 6:10 am I woke up to my phone alarm. I turned it off and attempted to drag myself out of bed. After a few hours of light sleep, I had forgotten I was waiting for his email. I checked my phone out of habit, as I did every morning, still hanging on to some thread of hope that I'd have an email from him saying "I made a huge mistake. I have to see you. I'm on the next flight out." That wasn't the email I woke up to. This was:

"Whitney,
I'm soooooooooooooo happy you've decided that you're going to give chatting a go still. I woke up this morning and had mixed feelings when I saw the email from you. I thought, is she replying and I've made her feel even worse after my last and it's going to be a bad email? When i read the first paragraph though, I was pretty damn excited to read the rest. I've been going absolutely crazy not being able to talk about my days with you. I was tempted to email you last night around 12.30am but figured as much as I wanted to, it wouldn't be fair, so I resisted. Anyway, think I've babbled on a bit there about pretty much nothing, but I'm glad you want to give this a go still. You're my first ever penpal. Your going away party sounds like it was an absolute blast. I'm really glad it went so well for you, the perfect way to leave New York."
He went on to talk about how great it was that my parents got to see the city. He also said, "I have heard the saying that everything is bigger in Texas but that sky sounds mind blowing. I'm trying to picture it in my head and I think I've got a kind of idea of what it's like from when I lived on top of a mountain in Cyprus and could just see for miles and miles but at the same time, I've got a different image of it. Sounds really nice though."
Then he talked about an Andrea Bocelli concert he'd been to recently where he was blown away by Bocelli's performance of Elvis's Falling in Love with You and Con Te Partrio. He talked about a new project he was working on a work that was going to save his company thousand and thousands of dollars a year. He commented on everything I'd said in my email, and told me about anything and everything that had gone on in his life since we'd last talked. The email was 2,042 words, and ended with "OK, I need to get my arse out of bed now to go to work. Can I just say that I'm REALLY REALLY REALLY happy that you still want to stay in touch like this. If it gets hard for you though, please do say because as much as I'm going to enjoy emailing you again, I want you to be OK with it all. I'm going to have an amazing day again after reading this."

I was so excited, I hit reply and started furiously typing a response. But then I stopped. If this was going to work out, we couldn't go back to the way things were. So I waited three days to respond.

In a way, Cayden was my diary. Although we tried to wait three days between emails, our emails were three times as long. Sometimes I'd scribble a word down on a post it and stick it on my desktop to remind me to tell Cayden about it. One day it said "Adventures." I knew he'd LOVE to hear about my upcoming adventures. My magazine features a different city in every issue with a handful of adventures to do when you visit, which meant I'd get to fly to some of these places, do these adventures, and write about them. I had finally found my dream job, and Cayden got to hear all about it. I ran off the peak of a mountain and flew 3,000 feet into the air during a paragliding adventure in Golden, Colorado, and went horseback riding through the mountains in one of the state's ghost towns. I went oystering and stand-up paddle boarding in Florida. Cayden got the earful well before the story was published.

He even told me about other girls.
"I met my mate for drinks and this girl was there too, as they are workmates. Anyway, we got on really well and laughed and joked and the group swapped numbers when we left. She wanted to meet up and I thought, we had a laugh so why not? I didn't realise that she really liked me though and wanted it to be a date. I then had to cancel on her because I don't want to be with anyone and she really didn't take too kindly to it. I explained that it's not a good time for me and she just wouldn't take no for an answer. In the end I just stopped texting because she just wouldn't accept that I don't want anything. My mate got some shit in work off her so he wasn't happy either. So much for honesty being the best thing."
To which I responded:
"Well, just because you don’t want a relationship right now doesn’t mean you can’t casually date someone. I mean, unless that’s not your thing. It’s not really my thing, but I’m not against it. I mean… we’re human beings… we have our needs :) But yeah, that whole casual thing gets awkward as soon as one of the people in the situation wants more out of it, which is probably bound to happen."

No, that isn't foreshadowing for my situation with Brady, in case you were wondering. It wasn't easy to hear him talk about girls, and Lord knows I didn't actually want him to causally date ANYONE. Just the thought of it put my stomach in knots. I know I said earlier that I was OK with just talking to him as friends, but that was a flat out lie. I still wanted him. Wanted him so badly. To get my mind off of that, I told him all about Brady.